Your business's success depends on the customers or clients
you choose. Sound farfetched? Here's what I mean.

Suppose Jane, Dan and a bunch of friends get together for a
touch-football game. Team captain Jane chooses all the best players
for her side. Team captain Dan gets stuck with the leftovers. With
all the best players, Jane's team wins hands down.

Now suppose Jane and Dan own competing companies. Jane
identifies her best prospects and actively pursues them, winning
all the most desirable clients. Dan takes a less direct approach.
He puts out a few "feelers" and slowly spreads the word
about his company. Then he sits back and waits for the phone to
ring.

While Dan wins a few clients over time, they're smaller,
less desirable accounts than Jane's. And Jane's company
sprints ahead, just like her team did on the football field.

Successful entrepreneurs choose their best prospects; they
don't wait for prospects to choose them. Here are three
important steps you can follow to put this strategy to work for
your new business:

Step 1. Focus on a narrow target. One of the biggest
stumbling blocks to entrepreneurial success is a lack of focus. I
often meet entrepreneurs who tell me their product or service is so
terrific, anyone can use it. They're marketing to businesses,
children, adults--anyone they think might listen to their message.
Instead of producing maximum sales in all markets, these
entrepreneurs get just a trickle of sales in each. Their lack of
focus fragments their marketing efforts--not to mention their
budgets.

To increase your sales, narrowly focus on your best prospects
and use your resources--time and a marketing budget--where
they'll get the best results.

Step 2. Identify your prospects. You'll identify
prospects differently depending on whether you're marketing to
businesses or consumers. If you're a business-to-business
marketer, you need to develop a qualified prospect list. Since the
accepted contact sequence in business-to-business communications is
call, mail, call, this prospect list is the tool you'll
work with day in and day out to contact your best prospects.

First, identify your types of prospects by category. What types
of businesses are they? Hospitals, restaurants and law practices
are a few examples. Select three or four primary categories, which
you'll fill out with about a dozen prospects in each.

As you choose businesses to put in each of your categories,
consider the qualifying criteria important to you, such as their
length of time in business, number of employees, location and any
other factors that make business prospects more desirable. Use
trade journals, directories, association membership lists and the
Internet to compile your list.

Once you've identified about 12 businesses for each of your
categories, contact the companies and ask for the name of the most
senior person capable of making buying decisions. Start as close to
the top as possible. For example, a public relations consultant
calling on banking chains would be better off starting with the
vice president of marketing, rather than the marketing director or
marketing manager. Start at the top of an organization and work
your way down, because if you start with lower-level
decision-makers, you can't easily go over their heads to the
boss without creating bad feelings.

If your business targets consumer prospects, you'll use
marketing communications--advertising, PR and direct mail, for
example--to generate leads instead of developing a prospect list.
Consumer marketers create a customer profile to guide them in
buying the right media. This one- or two-sentence description of
your best prospects should contain important demographics, such as
age, gender and household income.

If you own a computer training company, for example, you might
create the following profile: "Professionals aged 25-49 with
household incomes of $40,000-plus who live in XYZ ZIP Codes."
You could also develop a business-to-business prospect list with
two categories: colleges and universities, and major hospitals.

Step 3. Meet with qualified prospects. Unsuccessful
meetings cost you plenty in lost time and money. So it's vital
to pre-qualify every prospect carefully by phone before you set up
a meeting. No matter whether you're selling to businesses or
consumers, before you make that qualifying phone call, prepare a
list of questions. Then arrange to meet only with the prospects you
determine are the best qualified.

A qualified prospect has a need for your product or service, can
afford it and is willing to pay for it. That's why it's
good news when you discover prospects who are buying from your
competitor. It means that person fits the criteria.

The next time you encounter a prospect who says she's
perfectly happy with your competitor, think of it as your chance to
prove how much she'll benefit by working with you instead. By
choosing your own clients or customers in this way, you ensure
higher profitability and faster growth for your new business.

Kim T. Gordon is a national speaker, the author of
Growing Your Home-based Business ($12.95) and president of
National Marketing Federation Inc., which provides marketing
guidance by telephone to small and homebased businesses nationwide.
For information and books, call (800) 2-SOLVE-IT.

Reuse, Recycle, Repeat

By Eileen W. Teague

Don't think of pr as shame-less self-promotion. Think of it
as simply smart business practice. If you don't put your
company's name in the limelight, who will? Get double the bang
for your publicity buck with marketing consultant Joan
Stewart's tips for recycling PR.

"Climbing the media ladder is a great place to start for
people who have never had any publicity," says Stewart, whose
monthly newsletter, The Publicity Hound, is packed with
ideas for getting noticed. "If you've never had a
newspaper write about you, don't start by trying to get a
front-page story in TheWall Street Journal. The best
place to start is at the very bottom rung of the media ladder. Try
to get your alumni magazine or a special-interest publication in
your community to write an article about your business.

"Once you've gotten a special-interest publication to
write about your business, take a copy of that story, attach it to
a query letter and send it to an editor at the next-highest rung of
the ladder--your local weekly newspaper. Once you've gotten the
weekly to write about you, clip out that story and send it along
with a query letter to the editor of your local daily newspaper.
Keep climbing that ladder until you get to the top.

"Anytime you get a publication to write about you, always
have reprints made of the article. You can use those reprints in a
variety of ways. Include them along with proposals you're
making to potential clients. Take them to trade shows. If you have
a retail establishment, put them on your counter where customers
can see them. Placing the articles in your media kit helps
establish your credibility."

For a sample copy of The Publicity Hound, send a $5 check
payable to The Publicity Hound to Joan Stewart, 3930 Highway
O, Saukville, WI 53080.